Part 17

The flaw in the plan, of course, was that there was no way to confirm that Bobby was right when he pointed in some direction and said that the man or woman in the photograph was “that way”. Again, though, by accident we learned something. Or thought we learned something.

In addition to direction, he got a sense of distance. We couldn’t verify that, either, but the most interesting thing was when he looked at the picture of a woman in a picture taken at Sea World. The photo was of her training dolphins. Bobby did what he’d always done. He stared at the picture and then his eyes went vacant.

“I can’t find her,” he said. He sounded surprised. I was definitely surprised. He hadn’t really struggled with any of the others, though he said some of them were very far away, and felt faint to him. “I can’t find her,” he said, again. He turned in a circle, as if that might help. I glanced through the article and felt chills run down my spine.

“You can’t find her because she’s dead,” I said. “The article is about the accident that took her life.”

He looked at the photo again.

“Her colors are there,” he said.

“As is the part of her photograph that the rest of us can see,” I said. “Wow. People investigating missing persons would love to have you working for them.”

“That’s something I wouldn’t mind doing,” he said.

“At least they’d know they were still looking for a living person,” I said. “But you wouldn’t be able to help them find the body if the person was dead. That would be sad.”

“I didn’t think of that,” he said. “You’re right. I’d know right away if they were dead, and I’d have to tell all those loved ones the bad news. Maybe I wouldn’t want to work that way.”

I imagined him arriving somewhere, and fearful parents holding out a photograph. It would be difficult to make it go any differently than: “Hi, I’m Bobby Wilson. I’m sorry. Your son is dead. I wish I could tell you where to find the body, but I can’t do that. I’m really sorry, but I have to be going now. The next picture I look at might be of a person who is still alive.”

That didn’t happen again as we kept looking through magazines. We only spent an hour doing it, before it became obvious that we were practicing something we couldn’t confirm. It wasn’t very satisfying.

On the other hand, it was practice, and everything Bobby practiced, he got stronger and better at doing.

While we didn’t know it then, this practice of locating people far away from us would develop into an incredibly important part of Bobby’s talent.

We did figure out how to find someone in a localized area with more accuracy than just direction. We triangulated.

It was cumbersome, and only worked if we were looking for someone close by, but it gave us usable results. The way it worked was that we’d go to the local chamber of commerce and ask for a map and a copy of the pamphlet they inevitably had that listed the current members of the city council. There were always photographs. If they showed colors Bobby would pick one, study the picture, and then point. I wouldn’t show Bobby the map; I’d draw a line on it that corresponded to the direction he was pointing. Then we moved in a direction oblique to that line and he’d sense the person again. That gave us a second line that crossed the first. That might get us on the same block as the person, but a third line almost always got us within a hundred feet. A little deduction and we identified where we thought the person was. Surveillance either confirmed it, or suggested he’d been off.

Again, practice made him better and better. After a week he had a better than ninety percent success rate.

Of course it didn’t work on people who were in another state, or city. It would require moving hundreds or even thousands of miles, to get a “fix” on someone.

On the other hand, it might have been worth it to find people like Saddam or Osama. And, once an initial location was determined, the circle could be made smaller, until what we were doing in these towns would nail the person being hunted.

I thought of all kinds of ways Bobby’s abilities would make the NSA salivate. Not to mention DOD, and the CIA, and FBI and DEA and even Interpol. They’d all want him and they’d all claim they had priority for some reason. If Bobby worked on their terms, they’d work him to death in the first month.

It took three weeks of this craziness before it suddenly occurred to me, in a flash of epiphany, that Bobby didn’t need to know where someone was. If he could sense their colors, he could do things to their physical bodies.

Wherever they were.

Why hunt Osama when Bobby could just do to him what he’d done to Roger Jacobson? Not that I wanted Bobby to kill people - I didn’t. But there were other things he could do them that might be useful to our cause.

We’d been on the run for eight months after escaping from Cheyenne Mountain before I decided that Bobby at least had a chance of negotiation from a power position, and avoiding being assassinated. To be honest, I was tired of running, too. We were using a stolen plate on our car, now. The paper one had expired and I didn’t want to take the chance of registering it lawfully. One traffic stop for something stupid and we’d have to go on the offensive. We were going to go on the offensive, some day, (go public and make them let us do things our way) but I wanted that to be after a shitload of planning and preparation.

I knew the primary issue in all this would be the insatiable curiosity on the part of just about everyone Bobby came into contact with to answer just one question.

How did he do it?

That’s what they’d be willing to kill and dissect him to find out. I thought of it as like capturing the single remaining member of a species of songbird, and killing it so you could preserve the body and study it.

I was just as curious as the rest of them. The difference was, I had a shot at finding the answer.

That answer might lie in a locked box that Mother Superior Mary had the key to. Granted, she wasn’t supposed to give it to Bobby until his twenty-first birthday, and granted, he was only eighteen, but surely the circumstances called for altering Professor Wilson’s last wishes.

I didn’t want to take Bobby back to the convent. Even after eight months, they might have someone watching it. I’d have to approach her in a way that protected me from surveillance, too.

I stashed Bobby in a motel thirty miles from the convent. I spent two days wandering around on foot, near the convent, living like other homeless people. To prepare for it, I cut my hair with a pair of scissors, making a hack job of it. It was spring, and warm enough I didn’t have to have lots of clothing. I stuffed a few things in a child’s school back pack and poked into trash cans, examining the convent’s surroundings. Luckily, there weren’t any commercial buildings around. [Redacted] is a small town, and I knew it would be a challenge for any government agency to run a surveillance op without standing out. I had the same problem. People kept trying to help me. I got given money and food, bottles of water, and a ton of advice. I was urged to go to the shelter in town and seek services.

When I felt sure that my intended ingress point was secure, I waited until two in the morning and scaled a brick wall. I knew the grounds like the back of my hand, and knew how to get to Mother Superior Mary’s cell. Nobody was up. The place was as silent as a tomb.

Mother Mary’s door hinges needed oiling. She surprised me by sitting up before I got the door closed.

“Who is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s Sister Olivia,” I whispered.

“Oh, praise God. We’ve been so worried.”

“With cause,” I said. “I need to be quick.”

I told her what I wanted. She didn’t like the idea. I didn’t want to read her in on everything Bobby was capable of, these days, and I didn’t have time to wear her down. I just told her he needed the bargaining chip of knowing what his father knew. I told her about Cheyenne Mountain, though I didn’t go into detail about how we escaped.

“It’s only a matter of time before we get caught,” I said. “If he can’t answer their questions, I’m pretty sure they’ll be willing to cut up his brain to get those answers. I know enough about him to know that won’t work. We need access to whatever Professor Wilson put in that safety deposit box.”

Mother Mary might have eschewed the ways of the world, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t aware of them.

The key was not locked in the safe in her office. In a moment of foresight, she’d hidden it elsewhere. After we fled, it turned out that search warrants were issued and the convent was turned upside down in an effort to find information about Bobby. Her safe had been searched.

We didn’t even have to leave her cell. She plucked a crucifix off the wall and handed it to me. It was made of wood, beautifully carved.

“It’s in the bottom, on the back,” she said. “I carved a hole for it and then put putty over it. I stained it so no one could tell,” she said. “Take it. Please be gentle when removing the key. I’d like it back.”

She had destroyed the letter with Professor Wilson’s instructions in it, again on some premonition that having it around could be dangerous to Bobby, somehow.

“Only one other person knows of this key,” she said. “Her name is Melody Robbins, and I have no idea where she is or if the authorities know about her. She’s the one who brought Bobby here. She worked with his father. That’s all I know.”

I left, going out by a different route than I came in.

An hour later the crucifix and I were back in the motel room with Bobby.

The first thing Bobby asked me when I got back was how Mother Mary and the others were doing. I felt a little ashamed that I hadn’t asked, so I lied and said they were all fine. The next thing he asked was if Mother Mary had given me absolution for all the stealing and fornicating we’d been doing.

“She’s not a priest,” I said. “You know that.”

“Yeah,” he sighed. “I’d just feel better if somebody said we were forgiven.”

“God loves us,” I said. “He’ll be patient until we can get to a priest.”

“So, what about the key?” he asked.

“It’s in the cross,” I said.

All I had was the Leatherman, but by taking my time, I scraped away the putty.

We had the key!

Getting Professor Wilson’s materials out of the safety deposit box was anticlimactic, really. The People’s State Bank of [redacted] is a small bank. Noel Wilson had rented one of only two large boxes they had, and put both his name and his son’s on the paperwork. I knew Bobby would have to show ID, so we stopped off in [redacted] which was a big enough city that I had no trouble buying my way to a man who sold forged documents. There was a lot of suspicion, but Bobby got rid of that. He would have been invaluable as an undercover operative.

I didn’t go in the bank with him. By now he was fully capable of taking care of himself. The only way they could take him was by darting him, and I was pretty sure there wouldn’t be someone with a dart gun in the bank, waiting for us to show up.

Armed with a driver’s license from the state the bank was in, Bobby walked in and asked to get into his father’s box. Ten minutes later he was in the vault and the box was open. He was only there long enough to put the contents of the box in a bag I had given him. That consisted of two bound volumes and a sheaf of loose papers, rolled and circled with a rubber band that had not lasted. It came apart as he removed them from the bag in the car and showed them to me.

“You told them you wanted to keep the box, right?” I asked.

“Yup. They said it was paid for for three more years.”

“Good. We might need it again.”

We took the materials back to the motel and, before doing anything else, we moved. Bobby had been in that motel for almost a week, and we needed to relocate.

I drove us to an adjoining state and we splurged, checking into a Best Western motel. There was a little placard on the desk, listing the restaurants in the area, and which ones that delivered. We called KFC and asked them to deliver our order.

Then we delved into what turned out to be Professor Noel Wilson’s research into genetics.

The answers we craved weren’t there. At least they weren’t there in a form that either of us could understand.

Four hours later I had the gist of it, but not how it worked. Basically, over a period of twelve years, Professor Wilson had identified genes he believed were responsible for psychokinesis, telekinesis, and ESP. His research had revealed that, while everybody had the genes, in the vast majority of cases, the genes were turned “off”.

There was more, much more, but I was in way over my head. Uncle Sam’s scientists would love this stuff. The problem was that, while I didn’t understand how he’d done it, I got the inkling from the papers that Wilson had somehow gotten around the genes being turned “off”. He’d experimented on his son in the process.

I had a bad feeling that Noel Wilson had “made” Bobby.

Why was it a bad feeling?

Because if one Bobby could be made, then dozens ... or hundreds ... or even thousands of Bobbys could be made.

And at least a handful of them would go out of control.

All of human civilization would be at risk.

Maybe it wouldn’t be a doomsday, though. There was a hell of a lot of information there I just couldn’t understand. Maybe Bobby (and any other of potentially hundreds of others like him) could be turned “off”.

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The Seventh Sense

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